OH MY GOD, I JUST PEED. Lol, jk, but that horns up was INSANE at the end! God, Bernstein conducts with so much empathy! He really feels the orchestra working at the end, and I bet he was dang tired, too! That’s just an incredible ending and a great work of music.

The “horns up” is Mahler’s direction, not Bernstein’s addition. Should be done at the start of Mahler 3 as well, and it sounds even better with the German horns that Mahler would have used (and the Vienna Phil still does). I too was at this performance (in Ely Cathedral, not Edinburgh), which was notable for the use of an electronic organ, as the Ely instrument was not up to it! CBS also recorded the symphony with these forces at the time, but in the studio.

The announcement of the concert also sparked lots of jumping to wrong conclusions in CUMS (the Cambridge University orchestra). We had been told that CUMS was doing Mahler 8 in Ely and London, so with Bernstein coming to Ely at around the same time to do Mahler, it was too easy to jump to the conclusion that he was going to conduct us!

I watched a dvd of the concert last night for the first time…although a Mahler fan,and have spent a good deal of time in Ely Cathedral, I had no idea this concert had taken place on my doorstep…almost like seeing Mahler himself in action I like to think…..My dvd also features no.1 with Bernstein conducting at the concert houae in Vienna 1974…..